▋▋Exodus
● Some folk say I'm a fool, but there's more to this world than meets the eye.'
● as the hours ticked past
● the rudiments of needlework 入门针线活
● plimsoll, knickers
● The last day of term…we'd been on a school trip to Chester Zoo earlier in the week. That meant everybody in their Sunday best, vying for who had the cleanest socks and the most impressive sandwiches.
● orange squash
● murmurs of envy and shrieks of laughter
● They deserve each other 他们挺相配
● It was a Breeding Ground 养殖场
● 'You'll soon fit in,' she soothed.
● The teacher began to look a bit worried, but the class perked up.
● `Well, carry on then.'
● they weren't a charity
● two more sides 还有两面纸
● cross stitch, chain stitch 十字绣 链型绣
● sampler 绣布
● Silhouette-Motifs
● THE SUMMER IS ENDED AND WE ARE NOT YET SAVED. 夏日终结，我们尚未救赎。
● Mrs Virtue was a diplomatic woman, but she had her blind spots.
● whip and top
● I was bewildered, then angry, in-the-stomach angry
● mollusc
● what God has cleansed we must not call common.
● Abominations and Unmentionables 可憎的 不可说的
● someone with crushed testicles
● when she'd gone, I'd sneak a look
● You have been talking about Hell to young minds. 对无知年幼的心灵谈论地狱
● I had told all the others about the horrors of the demon and the fate of the damned.
● Better to hear about Hell now that burn in it later. 早点听说地狱真相，总比日后掉进地狱烧死要好吧。
● collage of an Easter bunny
● We are called to be apart
● Just because you can't tell what it is, doesn't mean it's not what it is.
● What constitutes a problem is not the thing, or the environment where we find the thing, but the conjunction of the two.
● Perception, she said was a fraud; had not St Paul said we see in a glass darkly, had not Wordsworth said we see by glimpses? `This piece of fruit cake'—she waved it between bites—`this cake doesn't need me to eat it to make it edible. It exists without me.'
● Once created, the creature was separate from the creator, and needed no seconding to fully exist.
● The daily world was a world of Strange Notions, without form, and therefore void.
● tetrahedron
● minstrel
● One day, a lovely woman brought the emperor a revolving circus operated by midgets.
The midgets acted all of the tragedies and many of the comedies. They acted them all at once, and it was fortunate that Tetrahedron had so many faces, otherwise he might have died of fatigue.
They acted them all at once, and the emperor, walking round his theatre, could see them all at once, if he wished.
Round and round he walked, and so learned a very valuable thing: that no emotion is the final one.
▋▋▋Leviticus
● candelabra
● My mother sang the tune, and I put in the harmonies.
● mug
● she'd like the Bible open at Revelation
● a check list with the burial instructions
● make sure that the dead had everything they wanted
● It reminded me of Rossetti who flung his new poems into the grave of his wife
● I enjoyed polishing the handles as a final touch.
● Rechabite Hall 禁酒
● That's for the Lord to decide
● took pity on
● I like my little break
● apostle
● Perfection, the man said, was a thing to aspire to. It was the condition of the Godhead, it was the condition of the man before the Fall. It could only be truly realised in the next world, but we had a sense of it, a maddening, impossible sense, which was both a blessing and a curse.
● ’Perfection,' he announced, `is flawlessness.'
● ‘The problem is,' continued the prince, `there's a lot of girls, but no one who's got that special something.'
● ’I want a woman, without blemish inside or out, flawless in every respect. I want a woman who is perfect.'
● Part two: the impossibility of perfection. The restless search in this life, the pain, the majority who opt for second best. Their spreading corruption. The importance of being earnest.
● An exhortation to single-mindedness
● The night continued, and the prince fixed his heart to evil.
▋▋▋▋Numbers
● Slowly I closed the book. It was clear that I had stumbled on a terrible conspiracy.
● Did that mean that all over the globe, in all innocence, women were marrying beasts?
● rubbed his spiky chin against my face
● When I married, I laughed for a week, cried for a month, and settled down for life.
● He slunk off. I half expected him to have a tail.
● peeling me an orange
● coconut macaroons
● muck
● She leaned forward, pinning my hair to the seat with her bosom.
● ‘May,' I gasped.
’Auntie May,' snapped my mother.
● mince
● a roll of sellotape
● ‘It's just her sleeve,' replied my mother, keeping her ‘H' as best she could.
● ‘You're a disgrace,' hissed my mother,
● ‘She's stuck up and I don't like her.'
● Battenburg cake: pink icing
● When Keats felt miserable he always put on a clean shirt.
● Not that I think there's owt wrong with a fridge mind, but you can go too far.
● as common as muck
● It's cold in here, very cold. The women suffer most. Their shoulders bared and white like hard-boiled eggs. Outside, under the snow, the river lies embalmed. These are the elect, and in the hall an army sleeps on straw.
● Getting old, dying, starting again. Not noticing.
▋▋▋▋▋Deuteronomy: The last book of the law
● Time is a great deadener. People forget, get bored, grow old, go away.
● nobles there were left plotted against each other
● Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. It's all there but hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end.
● Knowing what to believe had its advantages. It built an empire and kept people where they belonged, in the bright realm of the wallet….
● Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognise its integrity. To fit it, force it, function it, to suck out the spirit until it looks the way you think it should. We are all historians in our small way. And in some ghastly way Pol Pot was more honest than the rest of us have been. Pol Pot decided to dispense with the past altogether. To dispense with the sham of treating the past with objective respect. In Cambodia the cities were to be wiped out, maps thrown away, everything gone. No documents. Nothing. A brave new world. The old world was horrified. We pointed the finger, but big fleas have little fleas on their back to bite them.
● People have never had a problem disposing of the past when it gets too difficult. Flesh will burn, photos will burn, and memory, what is that? The imperfect ramblings of fools who will not see the need to forget. And if we can't dispose of it we can alter it. The dead don't shout. There is a certain seductiveness about what is dead. It will retain all those admirable qualities of life with none of that tiresome messiness associated with live things. Crap and complaints and the need for affection. You can auction it, museum it, collect it. It's much safer to be a collector of curios, because if you are curious, you have to sit and sit and see what happens. You have to wait on the beach until it gets cold, and you have to invest in a glass-bottomed boat, which is more expensive than a fishing rod, and puts you in the path of the elements. The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the sea.
Or the people who found Atlantis.
● And El Dorado is more than Spanish gold, which is why it could not exist. The ones who came home were mad with a vision that had no meaning. And so, being sensible, the collector of curios will surround himself with dead things, and think about the past when it lived and moved and had being. The collector of curios lives in a derelict railway station with a video of various trains. He is the original living dead.
● El Dorado
● The collector of curios lives in a derelict railway station with a video of various trains. He is the original living dead.
● So the past, because it is past, is only malleable where once it was flexible. Once it could change its mind, now it can only undergo change. The lens can be tinted, tilted, smashed. What matters is that order is seen to prevail…
● Perhaps the event has an unassailable truth.
● Constipation was a great problem after the Second World War. Not enough roughage in the diet, too much refined food.
● Here is some advice. If you want to keep your own teeth, make your own sandwiches…
▋▋▋▋▋▋Joshua
● not a speck of dust anywhere
● dishcloth
● poked my head round
● Pastor Spratt's crocodile nutcracker took pride of place on the mantelpiece
● What's all the fuss about
● Mrs White was making a sad cake
● ‘Well I'll take the dog out then,' I decided.
● the mill chimneys puffed out their usual serene smoke signals
● wiping my feet on the mat
● She smiled at me with those lovely cat-grey eyes and tugged at her rubber gloves.
● ‘I'll put the kettle on for a hot water bottle.'
● Melanie really did want to be a missionary, even though it was my destiny.
● I traced the outline of her marvellous bones and the triangle of muscle in her stomach. What is it about intimacy that makes it so very disturbing?
● go to university to read theology
● I didn't think it was a good thing on account of modern heresies.
● She thought she should understand how other people saw the world.
● ‘I love you almost as much as I love the Lord,' I laughed.
● her eyes clouded for a moment
● 'These children of God,' began the pastor, ‘have fallen under Satan's spell.'
● I ran out on to the street, wild with distress.
● Renounce her, renounce her,' the pastor kept saying, ‘it's only the demon.'
● Can love really belong to the demon?
● What sort of demon? The brown demon that rattles the ear? The red demon that dances the hornpipe? The watery demon that causes sickness? The orange demon that beguiles? Everyone has a demon like cats have fleas.
● ‘Well, the demon you get depends on the colour of your aura, yours is orange which is why you've got me. Your mother's is brown, which is why she's so odd, and Mrs White's is hardly a demon at all. We're here to keep you in one piece, if you ignore us, you're quite likely to end up in two pieces, or lots of pieces, it's all part of the paradox.'
● ‘Don't believe all you read.'
● I went to the window and burst a few of the geranium buds to hear the pop.
● ‘I'll repent,'
● Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet.
● The body that contains a spirit is the one true god.
● metaphysics
● sat in a deckchair
● I came on the tram
● ‘Fred, her underslip's showing,' tutted my mother
● heresy
● Some people's emanations are very strong, some people create themselves afresh outside of their own body.
● I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had. Some people's emanations are very strong, some people create themselves afresh outside of their own body. This is not fancy. If a potter has an idea, she makes it into a pot, and it exists beyond her, in its own separate life. She uses a physical substance to display her thoughts. If I use a metaphysical substance to display my thoughts, I might be anywhere at one time, influencing a number of different things, just as the potter and her pottery can exert influence in different places. There's a chance that I'm not here at all, that all the parts of me, running along all the choices I did and didn't make, for a moment brush against each other.
● Perhaps for a while these two selves have become confused. I have not gone forward or back in time, but across in time, to something I might have been, playing itself out.
● I miss the company of someone utterly loyal.
● Naming is a difficult and timeconsuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power.
● Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone.
● If you want to find out the circumference of an oil drop, you can use lycopodium powder. That's what I'll find. A tub of lycopodium powder, and I will sprinkle it on to my needs and find out how large they are.
● Perhaps it was the snow, or the food, or the impossibility of my life that made me hope to go to bed and wake up with the past intact. I seemed to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.
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